Blood Bowl - LA Marignon - Corinthian Winner !

[Bullock]

Another crowded game for people with at least 1 completed MP game.

Diplo is allowed but nation picks remain anonymous !

Picking will be done after the recruitment of players at a date scheduled 24h before it starts. First to pick first served. (i won't get the first pick to not be advantaged by my admin role)

So DO NOT TELL your nation wish when applying !!

I could use the help of someone not involved in the game to co-admin it. (only quick stuff to do, nothing boring)

Nation picking starts Saturday 10th at 3pm GMT. First to send to Llama is first to pick !


Players: ~15
Era: All
Map: Cradle of dominion (you can still make proposals with maps of similar size)
Magic site freq: 60
Renaming On
Graph Off (tell you preference)
Hall of Fame 15
Everything else set as default
Turn length: 30h then 50h around turn 30.
Mods: CBM 1.92 / Streamers and standards / single age mod
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/threads/download.php?Number=611021
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=39989
Diplo: Everything is allowed. Trades are binding.
Victory Condition: Control half of others Cap. (8 + your own cap)
There is no VP so send me your turn file when you think having met the victory conditions.

Gamelink: http://www.llamaserver.net/gameinfo.cgi?game=Blood_bowl

I'm expecting from people joining the game to not go AI or only when they get very weak (few prov left and all remaining forts sieged). Don't forget to reveal your identity before leaving :)
Game exploits are forbidden (Bogus orders, Troops blocking, lab filling and the recruitment of 0g Ettin)


Players :

Bullock - LA Ermor (DEAD)
HoleyDooley
KeithZ
TigerBlood
mattyburn7
Ossa
Corinthian
Triqui
CyborgKillerMonster - Nief (DEAD)
Bbz
Zywack
Admiral_Aorta
Tratorix
Robespierre
Hylobius - Ctis (Dead T16)
Shard

[HoleyDooley]

What the heck! In for a penny in for a pound.

More easy pickings for the pros, but I am getting better.

[KeithZ]

Please count me in.

I don't have a completed game in the forum (you know, another world is the first game I play here), but please let me in anyway, I won't give up my game easily.

[TigerBlood]

I'm game

[CyborgKillerMonster]

I`m in.

[mattyburn7]

I'd like to play.

[Ossa]

I'm in.

[Corinthian]

Perhaps it is time for me to stop mentoring and start playing again. I'm in!

[Bullock]

Welcome in everybody.
Cyborg can you allow PM plz ?

[CyborgKillerMonster]

Welcome in everybody.
Cyborg can you allow PM plz ?

Try now.

[triqui]

I'm in too

[TigerBlood]

Would you consider turning the graphs off? It might make the anonymous nature of the game more...interesting.

Just an idea. I can think of a few pros & cons either way.

[BewareTheBarnacleGoose]

Hi, can you count me in too?

[Corinthian]

No graphs I have not tried for a while, but combined with the fact that you dont know who your neighbors are it could really help make everyone paranoid. I like it.

[bbz]

No graphs I have not tried for a while, but combined with the fact that you dont know who your neighbors are it could really help make everyone paranoid. I like it.

Only with fixed positions start you know who your neighbours are.

Anyways count me in as well.

[Bullock]

Yeah i like sometimes playing with graph off and it has been a long time i haven't.

So if the majority is for we are going with graph off.

[triqui]

graphs off is a great idea in an anonymous game, I'm for it

[bbz]

if we don't know who is which nation, that means that diplo is carried out only ingame right?

+1 for graphs off

[Bullock]

Yeah you are not supposed to know who is owning what, so you can only communicate trough the game.

[CyborgKillerMonster]

Graf off.:up:

[Admiral_Aorta]

I'll join, I kinda prefer graphs on but I don't mind them being off too much.

[tratorix]

In.

[bbz]

May I suggest something I think 15 land nations will be too Packed. That means 13 lands provinces for each player. How about we say the maximum number of people is 15 and we somehow get an underwater nation? That would mean that every one of us gets 14.21 land provinces which sounds tad better than before.

[Bullock]

yeah i guess we have waited long enough.
Let's start at 15 or as it is by the end of the week.

[Nosantee]

I'll jump in on this if Good Bad Ugly is going down.

[Zywack]

After much pondering, I'd say I'm finally interested to join. I'd prefer graph on, but it's not a deal-breaker.

Just one question though: I'm not familiar with the exploits, and although I can guess what most of them are, I'm not sure what "Lab Filling" refers to. Is it putting a ton of mages in a single lab, or putting labs everywhere on the map, or something else?

[Bullock]

I'm not sure what "Lab Filling" refers to. Is it putting a ton of mages in a single lab, or putting labs everywhere on the map, or something else?

Its when an opponent send you tons of crappy items to fulfill your lab so your craft fail. Might be useful tactic when fighting for ubber item.

Welcome in.

[TigerBlood]

is that 15?

[Corinthian]

Well, if Nosantee would confirm his being in-ness, we would be fifteen players now.

Just one question though: I'm not familiar with the exploits, and although I can guess what most of them are, I'm not sure what "Lab Filling" refers to. Is it putting a ton of mages in a single lab, or putting labs everywhere on the map, or something else?

Well I have played for a while and I cant for the life of me understand that tactic either or how someone could ever pull it of? I mean, the magic item inventory have, what? 40-50 slots? And there is no way for the enemy to determine how many of them are full so there is no way to determine ho many he should send. He could send fewer than a full inventory but then he'd risk not blocking the creation of what ever item and thus having wasted the entire shipment.

If he chose to send a full inventory, then, assuming that the player plays MA Ulm (forgebonus 25%) have hammers for his smiths (+25%) and have the forge of the ancients; The true cost of the action would be 50 gems + 50 mage turns + 50 hammer turns + whatever for not using the forge for his own sake. (1 item = 1 gem)

I really cant see that this trick would pay out no mater what he suspects the enemy is about to forge.



Anyways, what do we do with the water. On one hand, there are 22 water provinces, 19? of them interconnected. On the other hand they are mostly in the middle of the map and spread all over the place.

Nevertheless, I would like to see at least two nations sharing the oceans if we are supposed to have water nations at all. Although that would leave 9.5 water provinces for each of them there is nothing preventing waternations from expanding onto land. Except the land nations of course.

PS: Final note: At least trades should always remain sacred even if there is no enforced diplomacy otherwise. You should always uphold your side of the trade and if someone gets an item or gems sent to them by mistake then they should send them back if you are sure they were not meant as a gift.

[Nosantee]

Sorry, other game still going. Really seemed like everyone was gonna jump ship but lo and behold they all decided not to cancel.

Since that one will still be going, I wont be in this one. Sorry!

[Admiral_Aorta]

I think the lab filling is more of a concern in unmodded games, where you can produce way more cheap items because of hammers and gemgens.

[BewareTheBarnacleGoose]

My apologies, but I am going to have to withdraw from this game. I was invited to join a rematch of my first MP game, and since I dont have time for more than 1 game, Im going to pick that one instead (too nostalgic :p).

Sorry I wont be joining you this time, I hope I get a chance to play with you all another time!

[Bullock]

Considering the recent moves, and if i m counting right, we are 13 actually.

I've received few msg about nation picking which remind me that my explanation in the op are not very clear.

So here is how i'm planning to do it.

Since i'm alone to admin and involved in the game, i m not supposed to know your nation pick. So the best solution i've found is to open the game on Llamaserver at a predefined time and as soon as it is up people can upload pretenders.

I was thinking of saturday around 3PM GMT to open the game. Thats 9AM for the US, middle of the afternoon for EU. Or at a random time on saturday?

If you have a better idea, express it. If you are not involved in the game and want to help co admin it PM me :)

[TigerBlood]

Sounds good. That will be around 11pm saturday for me.

Given that there are around 70 nations to choose from, I doubt there will be much competition for a specific nation.

I have a couple of choices, my back-up nation appears in multiple eras.

The only forseeable problem is if multiple peaople pick underwater nations. They may not have much room before being forced onto land.

[bbz]

The only forseeable problem is if multiple peaople pick underwater nations. They may not have much room before being forced onto land.

Then we can add a rule: If there is already a water nation you canno't choose one. So the first one with a water nation gets it.

[Bullock]

I dont see the point to cap water nation.
If there is already 2 and a 3rd player want to play anyway a water nation he knows what he goes for.

Btw i think it will be quite advantageous for the water nation if he s alone in the sea while playing a crowded map. Therefore i think a good number would be 2. But i'm not planning to set any restriction atm.

You can also PM me to delete a pretender if you change your mind before the game start.

[mattyburn7]

I checked Llamaserver but didn't see the singleage mod on there. I saw a couple looking through the forums. Can someone post a link to the one we are using?
Thanks!

[Bullock]

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...?Number=611021
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=39989

i ll had links to the op

[bbz]

The first link you added doesnt work.

[Bullock]

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/threads/download.php?Number=611021

Here is the good one.

[tratorix]

So, LA Ermor and Rl'yeh are allowed in this game right? Just want to be sure if I need to have possible counters for them in my pretender build.

[Bullock]

Yes they are, unless several people don't want to.

[Robespierre]

Hi.
Can I still join?

[Zywack]

LA Ermor is a possibility? I hadn't thought of that... Hmmm... The temptation to change my expected nation pick is certainly rising!

[Bullock]

Friendly reminder: it's an anonymous game !

Welcome in Robespierre.

[Zywack]

Friendly reminder: it's an anonymous game !

Welcome in Robespierre.

Welcome!

Oh, I know it's an anonymous game, no worries. I hadn't realized that what I had said could be interpretted that way until you mentionned it :)

[Corinthian]

Oh, and about LA Ermor/R'lyeth. They are fine in my book. Never had a problem with them really. The nation I would like to see banned on the other hand is EA Agartha. Because in the latest version of CBM they are bugged bad and no fun to play against at all. (Darkness PD + Super cheap permanent size 5 earth elementals. This on top of all the other boosts they have gotten.)

[bbz]

This and MA Ulm I'd say.

[Corinthian]

Yea. Actually my build can handle MA Ulm I think, but perhaps not everyone can have my build.

[bbz]

No but my concern is that being a anonymous game it will be hard to organise people together and counter an early forge.

[Admiral_Aorta]

While there are problems with EA Agartha as it currently is, I don't think it's bad enough that is needs banning. Forge of the ancients should be taken as a declaration of war on the entire world, though I suppose there is a possibility of people not organising against it in an anonymous game.

[Corinthian]

Admiral, to elaborate on Agarthas OP-ness, I played against EA Agartha in single player to test a build and I attacked their capitol with 10 E9N4 blessed rephalite warriors. The warriors lost. To 25 points of capitol PD. Thats 1500g worth of soldiers + the opportunity cost of the bless in design points that lost to 313g worth of PD that Agartha can slap down anywhere. Or just 200g for PD 20. If Agartha had actually bothered to patrol with some troops things would have been even worse.

As for Ulm, you of all people should know how dangerous Ulm can be even without the forge. I remember the game you and I were in ended in Ulms victory as early as turn 53!

[bbz]

Well I think that there were some rumours about forge of Ulm being about to be removed. I'd be ok with Ulm if we make a rule that forge of Ulm is not to be used or something like that, that should make it a bit more balanced.(on top of other things that are not balanced about Ulm atm) But I'd rather have them banned.
The problem with Agartha is that it's like a Nut-shell. At early game there are not many nations that can go through their pd alone not to mention if its supported by an army. So while you can fight them at your own land if they conquer something of yours you canno't in any way take it back cost effectively.(which should hamper a lot Sacred rush nations or if your starting position requires you to go for an early war with EA agartha (say you cannot expand unless you fight a war with them) Also there are some rumours that the Darkness is going to be removed in the next CBM so that is enough reason for me to think that its unbalanced and I wouldn't mind having them banned as well)

[Bullock]

i wasn't expecting this kind of debate with those 2 nations.
I don't know them well, so i can't really pick a decision.

Therefore i ll start a poll with this 2 nations & ermor/ryleh LA and people involved in this game will choose to ban or not.

[bbz]

While there are problems with EA Agartha as it currently is, I don't think it's bad enough that is needs banning. Forge of the ancients should be taken as a declaration of war on the entire world, though I suppose there is a possibility of people not organising against it in an anonymous game.

The things I don't like even in normal games is that when someone casts an "I win spell" everyone waits not to be the first one to attack. So whoever attacks first gets hit the worst from the "I win the game" owner and the rest of the vultures then feed on both of them.:D
Or if no one moves in on time then the "I win guy" just wins.

[CyborgKillerMonster]

So, a lot of discussion here. May be strenght of independens - 9?

I look at poll, and it seems to me like someone want play LA Ermor and does not want competition. :)

[Admiral_Aorta]

I'm aware that Ulm and Agartha are quite powerful at the moment but I see no reason to ban them. If enough people think they should be banned then do so.

[Zywack]

I'll abstain on voting. I'm not too familiar with MA Ulm and EA Agartha so I can't judge their overpoweredness (or lack of it). LA Ermor and R'Leh are a huge annoyance to fight against, but they are beatable... So "abstain on voting" is my call :)

On the other hand, independents 9 feels a bit much from what I've seen so far: The problem is that if one player is unlucky with the provinces surrounding their capital (all big nasty stacks), they might end up falling a turn or two behind the others during early expansion.

[bbz]

I agree with Zywack best leave the independents on standard. Since that is the default settings. Stronger independants make the Production scale worth more than its default worth.

[Hylobius]

Sounds interesting, I'd like in if there is one spot left.

[TigerBlood]

Ban nothing, I say. Maybe ban exploits like recruitable 0 gold Ettins, but otherwise my preferences are fairly permissive.

[bbz]

Great We have 15 should we start the game earlier?

[Bullock]

Ban nothing, I say. Maybe ban exploits like recruitable 0 gold Ettins, but otherwise my preferences are fairly permissive.

There is already few rules in the OP, such as the issue with ettins.

Great We have 15 should we start the game earlier?

I prefer to wait on Saturday for a fair nation picking.
There is still room if some people want to join.

[bbz]

I prefer to wait on Saturday for a fair nation picking.
There is still room if some people want to join.

Fair enough.

[shard]

Sorry didnt know this game was still recruiting.

If it's ok count me in too please.

[bbz]

I suggest count him in and close the recruiting. 220 provinces/ 16 players = 13 provinces each and thats quite crowded and some people will get map screwed with their positions if we get more people.

[TigerBlood]

Well...I'm looking forward to the game being up later on this evening. I'm going to make sure I'll be home in time in order to submit my desired choice.

[Bullock]

Alright shard you are in.
The server open his doors in 4 hours !

[bbz]

Just a quick question what happens if there is only 1 water nation? or if there are none?

[Bullock]

If there is only 1 water i suggest everyone dogpiled him.
If there is no water nation i suggest we dogpiled all land nations that can easily go underwater :)

[bbz]

The thing is the way I see it with the whole anonimus thingy. I think having a water nation already picked would highly discourage everyone else to pick another one. Why should they fight for some 22 provinces in the water when you can have more space on the land. Can I make a suggestion: although it going to be enforsing it to someone, but since its first pick first served should we say : if there happens to be a water nation then the last guy to pick should get another water one maybe(if no one elese has picked one) That is of course if there is only 1, 0 should be ok.(I'm looking at if from a balance point of view) There is really not much you can do early on against say LA R'lyeh and later on the advantage (as extra provinces and no wars)they get is going to win them the game. And in a anonimus game without charts its gonna be hard as hell to organise anything.


At least like that if a water nation is to control all the 22 sea provinces they would have fought for it and deserve the advantage.

[Bullock]

Well you have compute earlier the lands for each player which is around 13.

If there is only 1 water nation, a second guy can pick an other water nation and expect 11 water prov + 2 lands prov. (and he has the same average amount of lands than any other nation)

The true problem is only 1 water nation, which unlikely to happen.
And if it happens i ll sacrifice myself and take the 2nd water nation. So don't worry :)

I also want to remind everybody that you can delete your actual pretender, before the game starts, by sending me a PM. (so some1 with land nation can switch to a water for example, or the 1rt pick of water nation want to change because two others peeps picked after him water nation and he thinks water is too crowded)

[bbz]

Well you have compute earlier the lands for each player which is around 13.

If there is only 1 water nation, a second guy can pick an other water nation and expect 11 water prov + 2 lands prov. (and he has the same average amount of lands than any other nation)

The true problem is only 1 water nation, which unlikely to happen.
And if it happens i ll sacrifice myself and take the 2nd water nation. So don't worry :)

I also want to remind everybody that you can delete your actual pretender, before the game starts, by sending me a PM. (so some1 with land nation can switch to a water for example, or the 1rt pick of water nation want to change because two others peeps picked after him water nation and he thinks water is too crowded)

Ok fair enough:)

[Bullock]

game is UP!!!

[bbz]

I wish all of you good luck. Also thats why people didnt want to ban the nation. We just need one more picking MA Ulm and its gonna be the fight of the broken ones.

[CyborgKillerMonster]

Yeah, All we need is Ulm. Ta da ta da ta.

I bet that any one of four banraces will not win

[TigerBlood]

So far..very interesting.

Middle age is getting no love.

I was kind of hoping to see a face-off between nations of different eras, like EA R'lyeh or EA Ermor. Could still happen.

[Bullock]

Good luck and have fun gentlemen.

[Zywack]

Man, that doesn't look a terribly fun lineup... Let's try to have fun anyway! :)

[Bullock]

Only 4 more slots and only one water nation.

[Bullock]

Man, that doesn't look a terribly fun lineup... )

why that ?

There is a lot of diversity and only one of the 2 "uber nations".

[bbz]

Man, that doesn't look a terribly fun lineup... )

why that ?

There is a lot of diversity and only one of the 2 "uber nations".


I can count 5 of the :) "uber nations"/"better nations". not going to mention which ones (not to reveal my confidentiality), but they are easy to spot:)

But then again fear is in the eyes of the beholder.
And it should be fun:)

[Bullock]

Draw the list plz :)

[Bullock]

You could have missed your "5 ubber nations", so you could have drawn the list.

Ofc now it's too late.

Anyway, only one pretender remaining and it's a go !

[Bullock]

Ahh we have only one water nation... !!

Well good for him BUT i'm expecting it will be taken in consideration by everybody if we continue as it is. I was confused and forgot LA Atlantis wasn't a water nation. (at least not his cap).

i see few other nation that can take water provinces so i think we can go like that. If few people think it's a bad idea to go like this we will reroll the game with another water nation.

[bbz]

I personally find LA atlantis to be okish the problem I see is if they get into war with a land nation they'd just screw the seas. On the other hand we have Fomoria(although not a good example), Patala (another not really good example), and EA agartha to go for the seas. Also LA Ermor should be ok with getting into water. But I don't see that as putting much pressure on R'lyeh early on so it all depends on Atlantis player and if he goes for the seas or not.

[tratorix]

LA Rl'yeh was one of the first nations picked, so no one picked another water nation because they all have functioning brains. No other water nation is really good at fighting Rl'yeh, so basically penciling yourself in for an early war with them is kind of stupid.

[Corinthian]

Well, LA Atlantis is almost custom built to deal with LA R'lyeth so I dont mind. And we dont really know who is playing the uber nations so it might be some of the noobier people. In witch case its fine.

[CyborgKillerMonster]

Go, go, go. I want some sushi a la Lovecraft.

[bbz]

Ok you got me I am in control of LA R'lyeh and with so much hate around me I admit defeat outright, you can set me to AI I dont mind:D As my last will I leave all my territories to: (spoilers)

[Admiral_Aorta]

That better be a joke post.

[bbz]

o.O what do you think it is? (Playing mind games thats exactly their style:P)

[Zywack]

I mostly picked my nation by thinking: "Oh my god I'm not sure I want to be in this game anymore!" We'll see what it'll bring :)

[triqui]

O great. I sent the wrong pretender :/

Whatever, let's see what happen

[Corinthian]

Did you send the lord of plenty? What were you going to send?

[Bullock]

To be more accurate on the victory conditions now we have the complete list of players, i think 8cap + your own cap is a good objective.

[Zywack]

Oh, quick question! If you are dead, are you allowed at that point to state who you were playing and issue a good bye, or is that also not allowed in an anonymous game?

Note: The nation that I'm playing is neither dead or dying at this current point in time. :)

[bbz]

Oh, quick question! If you are dead, are you allowed at that point to state who you were playing and issue a good bye, or is that also not allowed in an anonymous game?

Note: The nation that I'm playing is neither dead or dying at this current point in time. :)

Damn it so you didnt start with 1 dominion power imprisoned pretender and you didnt get unlucky event that drops your dominion turn 1:S

I'm not sure about the first one coz the fewer players remain the clearer it will be who is who.

[bbz]

But I guess If we were to keep the trade agreements and making plans for ingame. It should be allright(I personally would be ok with it:) )

[Zywack]

Oh, quick question! If you are dead, are you allowed at that point to state who you were playing and issue a good bye, or is that also not allowed in an anonymous game?

Note: The nation that I'm playing is neither dead or dying at this current point in time. :)

Damn it so you didnt start with 1 dominion power imprisoned pretender and you didnt get unlucky event that drops your dominion turn 1:S

I'm not sure about the first one coz the fewer players remain the clearer it will be who is who.

Well, I have a friend who had a Vampire Lord attack on the 2nd turn on his capital so it can happen in various ways :)

[bbz]

Oh, quick question! If you are dead, are you allowed at that point to state who you were playing and issue a good bye, or is that also not allowed in an anonymous game?

Note: The nation that I'm playing is neither dead or dying at this current point in time. :)

Damn it so you didnt start with 1 dominion power imprisoned pretender and you didnt get unlucky event that drops your dominion turn 1:S

I'm not sure about the first one coz the fewer players remain the clearer it will be who is who.

Well, I have a friend who had a Vampire Lord attack on the 2nd turn on his capital so it can happen in various ways :)

Yea there is always hope:D

[Corinthian]

Nice to see that we can actually get several turns a day this early in the game. A turn in the morning and a turn in the evening would be great. Well, with as many players as we have now there will always be someone who cant do a turn, I guess. But I can dream cant I?

[triqui]

Oh, quick question! If you are dead, are you allowed at that point to state who you were playing and issue a good bye, or is that also not allowed in an anonymous game?

Note: The nation that I'm playing is neither dead or dying at this current point in time. :)

Damn it so you didnt start with 1 dominion power imprisoned pretender and you didnt get unlucky event that drops your dominion turn 1:S

I'm not sure about the first one coz the fewer players remain the clearer it will be who is who.

Well, I have a friend who had a Vampire Lord attack on the 2nd turn on his capital so it can happen in various ways :)

I have been attacked this turn by a Vampire Lord. Fortunately, I won the battle. My armies had a decent supply of garlic, crosses and wooden stakes.

[bbz]

hahahaha:D No way!!! I was attacked last turn those damned vampires:) Our armies were quite competent in dealing with them as well.

[Corinthian]

Hmm, not much talk here when you cant talk about your own nation.

But anyway, Ermor is looking pretty dangerous from my limited view. Seems like he managed to get his wraith lord hero show up on turn three or four and has been using it to expand with.

[Bullock]

Hmm, not much talk here when you cant talk about your own nation.

But anyway, Ermor is looking pretty dangerous from my limited view. Seems like he managed to get his wraith lord hero show up on turn three or four and has been using it to expand with.

Unfortunately you can't even have this kind of discussion here.
Actually you just gave the information that you were a nation near Ermor.

However i encourage everybody to have this kind of discussion in-game with the chat command "send to everyone".

[Corinthian]

No I did not. The wraith lord hero is currently number one in the hall of fame. I just remembered his name. And he has been in the hall of fame for a while.

[Bullock]

Oh yeah you are right, sorry.
Anyway these kind of talks are tricky here.

[triqui]

It's hard even to make jokes about gods dying in this kind of games :/

[Admiral_Aorta]

Yeah that hero makes ermor much more dangerous, he's almost like a mini pretender.

[Admiral_Aorta]

I'll be away from a computer with dom3 for a few days, so can the timer be put on hold until then?

[Bullock]

Can you try to find a sub ?
some1 you know maybe since you can't really do adverts in the chat.

[Admiral_Aorta]

What, for 2 and a bit days? There doesn't really seem much point. Also I have submitted my current turn.

[bbz]

Yea this turn should be done by the end of tomorrow and if we extend the game then with 24ish hours it should be allright.
The problem is that like that we would know which nation you are:D (the one that hasn't submitted a turn).

[Bullock]

What, for 2 and a bit days? There doesn't really seem much point. Also I have submitted my current turn.

ok i ll extend next turn by 48h to be sure.

[Corinthian]

In the future it might be better if extend requests are sent directly to the admin.

[Bullock]

I had also the idea, but i thought some people would consider it would be unfair that i have the info and not the others.

[bbz]

We trust you:)

[Admiral_Aorta]

I'm back, I sent my turn in.

[shard]

My apologies, but something might be coming up for me this coming couple of weeks; is it possible to extend the turn timer to 30hrs?
Also, just in case, how do you change the email address for the turns?

[bbz]

it is 30 hours. The email address for the turns is changed by the admin.

[Bullock]

Do you want a postpone of 30h on the current turn? i'm not sure to understand you.

Btw for mail switching Bbz is right u have to PM me.

[bbz]

I think he meant he will be busy in the upcomming weeks so he wanted the turn timer to be extended in general to 30h per turn. But that is what it is at the moment.

[shard]

Sorry, with the pace we've been going it felt pretty fast. In that case I'd like to request a 36hr timer from turn 14.

Basically I will be unexpectedly travelling starting from next weekend and I'm not sure whether I can get consistent internet connection.

[Bullock]

Ok fair enough.
I think nobody will complain for an extra 6h.

[Zywack]

No problems on my side for the delay.

Man, I got to say that diplomacy is a heck of a lot harder to do with the in-game communication thingy!

[bbz]

I agree with you:) but it makes it more realistic. You are not talking to me or to someone on this forum but rather to your neighbours in the fantasy world.:)

[Bullock]

I agree with you:) but it makes it more realistic. You are not talking to me or to someone on this forum but rather to your neighbours in the fantasy world.:)

And your messenger need a month to do the trip :)

[Bullock]

added 12h for the 2 slow guys.

[Bullock]

Alright we have already Ctis down.
Don't forget to post your nick here, there is no shame :D

[Admiral_Aorta]

Posting names here would reveal a bit much wouldn't it? Especially later on when more and more people get defeated.

[Bullock]

Yeah but i think the interest of anonymous play is essentially in the early stage of the game and then decrease.

Btw it's fun to discover who is who while the game is running otherwise most people won't know. (all those who have defeated a while ago before the end)

So unless many people is against the idea i'd pleased to see name of people defeated.

[triqui]

How can one tell about a NAP breaking in a game anonymous?

I was offered a NAP, I accepted, then I got Attacked anyway.

[bbz]

yea its considered non binding, unfortunately this is an anonymus game and people thing that they might be able to hide and others won't know if they broke their nap . But yea breaking it is absolutely fine. I assume because of the anonymus nature of the game people will be breaking more and more naps and will be using it as a strategic move. Just do whatever you usually do to teach them a lesson.

Also now you just revealed your personality to the attaker so shouldnt post those kind off comments in here.

Could have asked it as a random question without the second sentence:)

(although the anonymous nature of the game is up to people and I don't really mind it either way)

@ Bullock: I'd love to see whoever was defeated as well.

[Corinthian]

Well the anonymous part of this game mainly exist to prevent diplo and ganging up on people from outside of the game. Weather or not we know the identity of the C'tis player now does not impact that.

Then again, I might also have hesitated to step forward if I was the first player to get eliminated. Though I notice from the pretender screen that C'tis only started with a dom strength of 4, so maybe this was an accident that was bound to happen.

[bbz]

How do you see what dom strength has someone picked through the pretender screen?

[Corinthian]

The number of epithets that a pretender get. You get one for every two points of dominion strength. Or more precise dom 1-2 = 1 epithet, dom 3-4 = 2 epithets, and so on. I doubt he only took dom 3 though. That would be suicide.

[bbz]

Btw are you sure? I just created 3 pretenders with dom 4 and two of them had 3 epithets.
Tested it couple more times its easy to create a pretender with 3 epithets and dominion score of 4

[Zywack]

Then again, I might also have hesitated to step forward if I was the first player to get eliminated. Though I notice from the pretender screen that C'tis only started with a dom strength of 4, so maybe this was an accident that was bound to happen.

It's still quite early and we don't have any of the big dominion-kill nations except for Marignon so I don't think C'Tis disapearance was due to that... Probably more a case of "Let's gang 3 people on the poor lizards". I'll admit I could be wrong, though!

[Hylobius]

The consensus seems to be that we reveal our names as we are eliminated, so I was C'tis. I can't say how I was defeated without revealing too much, but Dominion was not the problem.

[Bullock]

Alright ! Thx Hylobius for participating.

Now concerning Shinu i ll look for a sub for him if he stales the next turn.

[Corinthian]

Btw are you sure? I just created 3 pretenders with dom 4 and two of them had 3 epithets.
Tested it couple more times its easy to create a pretender with 3 epithets and dominion score of 4

Hmm, interesting! I just tested it myself and I also got 3 epithets on half of them. Maybe you get epithets from other things? A guy with E9 got 3 epithets, but a rainbow got two? Is there random chance in this? Got to test more.

Edit: After some further tests I have noticed that a Cyclops with dom 4 and E9 got two epithets 7 times and three epithets 4 times. Nothing else was different. Among two dom 10 pretenders one got four epithets and one got five. So it definitively have something to do with dom strength. Just not as exactly as I though.

[Admiral_Aorta]

Epithets aren't just dominion related, they seem to vary based on magic, chassis and sometimes nation.

[bbz]

Btw are you sure? I just created 3 pretenders with dom 4 and two of them had 3 epithets.
Tested it couple more times its easy to create a pretender with 3 epithets and dominion score of 4

Hmm, interesting! I just tested it myself and I also got 3 epithets on half of them. Maybe you get epithets from other things? A guy with E9 got 3 epithets, but a rainbow got two? Is there random chance in this? Got to test more.

Edit: After some further tests I have noticed that a Cyclops with dom 4 and E9 got two epithets 7 times and three epithets 4 times. Nothing else was different. Among two dom 10 pretenders one got four epithets and one got five. So it definitively have something to do with dom strength. Just not as exactly as I though.

yea It would be interesting to find out about how it works, but I fear It will be hard testing(also something I think might apply to them getting different names is the times you click on decreasing/increasing some scale. (or Magic paths) But Im not sure)

[Zywack]

I wonder what's wrong with Shinuyamas?

The other game I play is me subbing for a Shinuyama player that also left, and I recall seeing a mention that someone else was looking for a Shinuyama sub lately... So it seems common for Shinuyama players to disapear. I wonder why?

I mean, Shinuyama didn't amaze me so far but they are pretty decent and fun to play with quite a few viable options from what I can see. They probably won't be my pick in my next multiplayer game, but I'll most likely play them again sometime in the future.

[bbz]

probably they are not too easy to handle by new players.

[triqui]

So bassically the NAP's are completelly useless. Oh dear. Let's see what will happen :)

[Bullock]

So bassically the NAP's are completelly useless. Oh dear. Let's see what will happen :)

not really you can still make a public announcement and tell the treachery.

[bbz]

Thats why I said If he posted it in the forums I would have told him to make it public. Now if he does that we would all know what nation he is playing)

@ Bullock : On a different note Shinu is back. Is a sub found or our guy came back?

[Bullock]

He's back.

[triqui]

Yeah, I can say the treachery. I'm a nation. And another nation, who has neighbours, attacked me after offering a NAP that I accepted.

Hope it helped :P

[Zywack]

Yeah, I can say the treachery. I'm a nation. And another nation, who has neighbours, attacked me after offering a NAP that I accepted.

Hope it helped :P

Well... you could have sent a message to everyone in the ingame messaging system so this way we would at least know that Nation A got betrayed by Nation B, so we could be careful of Nation B negotiations. Might be a bit late to do that and keep your nation anonymous, though.

[triqui]

Errr. Whatever. Forget what I said, completelly my fault.

I sent the message with the aproval of the NAP to the WRONG nation. It's my first game with one unified age mod. There was no treachery, just me being dense :(

[HoleyDooley]

Your human mate. Don't fret about it.

Oh and I wasn't one of the parties in this mix up.

I am in some other part of the world grimly holding on...just!

[mattyburn7]

Thought I'd bump this board up!

[Bullock]

i hope every1 enjoying this game as i do :)

There is few nations who starts to grow big but the game looks kinda balanced.

[Bullock]

Btw do you want to increase the timer ? if 1/3 of peeps are for, i ll increase to 48.

[Admiral_Aorta]

I'm okay with the current timer, but I imagine there's others who might like it increased, LA Ermor and R'lyeh especially.

[bbz]

I'm fine with the current timer.

[Bullock]

I'm okay with the current timer, but I imagine there's others who might like it increased, LA Ermor and R'lyeh especially.

not sure, they look both quite weak cause both dogpiled. i might be wrong though.

[mattyburn7]

I"m having a blast. Don't want to give anything away though!

[Zywack]

Things definitively didn't go according to plan since extremely early, but... It's certainly more entertaining than I thought it would be, and it's a good learning experience too. "You learn by your mistakes", well I'm certainly learning a lot this game!

I'm fine with the current timer by the way.

[Bullock]

Turn extended on request for 72h but expecting to be back in 48.

[HoleyDooley]

Please go back to 48, I have int cafe access twice a day thx.

[Admiral_Aorta]

Has ryleh only just gone AI or am I just unobservant?

[bbz]

Oh yea he has hasn't he:D
Looks like there is only one nation that remains to be destroyed from the OP ones:D

[bbz]

P.s he should have asked before turning AI, I don't know what his situation was if he has all of his casltes besieged I guess its fine, but I think its only fair enough to let us know beforehand.

[Corinthian]

To be fair. From what I can see from my lofty abode, the AI is seemingly doing better than the player did. What with having ended the siege(?) and raiding Patala and Fomoria.

[Zywack]

Maybe we are witnessing the beginning of Skynet, an AI going to crush everyone in the world...

[Bullock]

Don't forget to reveal yourself when you leave please.

[Bullock]

postponed 24h on request

[Bullock]

Well ... i'm dead, i was playing LA Ermor and i have been dogpiled like every good LA Ermor should be.

I keep the admining stuff duty so PM me if you need anything.

[Zywack]

It's very nice of you to keep administring the game!

I can't say I'll be complaining about a dead Ermor though: All the lightnings were getting a tad annoying... Well, and not to mention that a dead LA Ermor is a good LA Ermor.

[CyborgKillerMonster]

This is the end. I`ll go to AI, because my ice giants fall. Congratulations to Bogarus.

[Corinthian]

That was a wonderful and unexpected comeback from Bogarus. Kudos to him. Dont think I have ever seen something like that before.

[Corinthian]

Oh, and (EA?) Agartha has been stalling 4 turns in a row now. It would be nice if we could find a sub for him, or if, say, a non-playing admin would put him AI. He does not seem to be in all that bad shape despite the stalls though.

Although AIs in this game have constantly proven to be better players than the ones they took over for previously. After all, R'lyehs AI did pretty well. And Niefelheims AI just destroyed Bogarus big communion:D

[bbz]

hahaha:D That is amusing:D

[Zywack]

Hmm? According to the pretender list, Niefelheim isn't AI right now.

[mattyburn7]

Yep. Looks like he stayed in after all..Perhaps trying to be tricky! :confused:

[Bullock]

Oh, and (EA?) Agartha has been stalling 4 turns in a row now. It would be nice if we could find a sub for him, or if, say, a non-playing admin would put him AI. He does not seem to be in all that bad shape despite the stalls though.

Although AIs in this game have constantly proven to be better players than the ones they took over for previously. After all, R'lyehs AI did pretty well. And Niefelheims AI just destroyed Bogarus big communion:D


I'll have a look to the current EA Agartha situation. If it's subbable i'll do it. Otherwise i ll turn him AI.

I'm waiting for the active Agartha to take his turn so i won't do a mistake while changing mail address.

[KeithZ]

Agartha is back in the latest turn, instead Atlantis has been staled for two turns.

[Corinthian]

Despite LA Atlantis being the biggest nation in the game, he has stalled 7 times thus far. Or is Fomoria the biggest nation now? Caelum has been attacking Atlantis for the last couple of turns and the stalls are not helping Atlantis any.

[bbz]

I'd still say I fear Atlantis more than Fomoria just because of the globals he has. I'm not sure who is the biggest though.

[Zywack]

That explains a lot then. I was wondering why they were always waiting for the last second to play their turn: I know that some people like to wait until the very last moment to play their turn for diplomacy purposes, but that really doesn't apply in an anonymous game where we have no communication beside the in-game messenger thing...

[HoleyDooley]

At the setting of the sun, the God of Arco is no more. He bowed out in a gallant fight against Agartha in his capital and gave him a bloody nose to remember us by.

Cheers,

HD

[Admiral_Aorta]

I'm going away overnight tomorrow morning and won't be back until the day after tomorrow, can I get a delay until then? I've submitted my current turn already.

[Zywack]

It might be a good idea to send a private message to Bullock about that request: This thread isn't too active (Hard to discuss much when anonymous) so I'm not sure how often people check on it.

HoleyDooley: Thanks for having joined us this game, and better luck in your next one :)

[Admiral_Aorta]

Actually I don't need a pause on the timer becasuse my flight was cancelled.

[Bullock]

a quick msg to say it has been done.
I did it from my smartphone and was too lazy too post here from it. (slow & boring)

Sry about your holidays Admiral.

[Admiral_Aorta]

I'm afraid I'm gonna have to ask for a pause on the timer since I've got hardware problems. If it doesn't fixed in a reasonable amount of time I'll look for a sub.

[Zywack]

Cancelled flight and computer problems? That doesn't sound like the best of week!

I think I'd have raged in anticipation if the delay happened last turn, but now I can just take it as a Dominions 3 vacation instead so the delay's all good on my side.

[Admiral_Aorta]

Ok my computer is working again so my turn has been submitted.

[Bullock]

72h postpone on fomoria's request.

[bbz]

Should we find a substitute for Agartha(asking the question again) They would have stalled for 5 turns after this one.

[HoleyDooley]

I'll sub if you need one.

I was Arco and was eliminated some turns back...ironically enough by Agartha...lol

HD

[bbz]

Oh hi yea I'll send Bullock a message.( we are talking about the other Agartha btw) the EA one.

[HoleyDooley]

Thats what i mean, i was playing Arco in this game and was eliminated by Agartha..in this game...now I get the chance to resurrect myself as my own killer.....lol.

[Zywack]

I'll vote "Yes" on the replacement idea. It's a step up over turning the nation AI, and it's two step up letting it go completely dormant. If they can't put in a single turn over that long a period, it's likely that they won't be comming back.

Beside, if the "I takeover the nation that beat my nation" cycle happens often enough, you'll end up with a glorious victory :D

[HoleyDooley]

Good idea Zywack......

Note to whomever beats me when I am playing Agartha, feel free to stale once I am eliminated!

[Bullock]

Alright then.
So Holey is the new owner of EA Agartha.

And i'm postponing for Fomoria 48h

[bbz]

a message to all the free people on this earth. We must unite and fight against the common enemy - Marignon, He is headed for the victory, lets make him pay if he wants to get there!

[Admiral_Aorta]

well you can take your pick of marignon or fomoria really

[bbz]

Good point although I feel (from my limited spies network) that Fomoria is loosing out.

[Corinthian]

Currently I think the power balance in the game is quite even. Although I agree that Marignion is most likely the strongest.

I see a lot of things with my scouts and diplomacy and I think there are five nations with a good shot at victory.

1) Marignion: It is the biggest nation. But it is also caught up fighting two of the other power nations. And both of those nations have tartarians. Also fights Atlantis still, but I dont know how much forces atlantis have left in its forts. Is also a blood nation. Purgatory global probably keeps Fomorias Morrigans at bay though. Used to have the Gale Gate global.

2) Fomoria: Was the scares nation for a while due to crazy blessed morrigans and Tartarians with artifacts. But they have lost land to Mari so I guess they are not invincible. Probably have most of the artifacts. They have the really high priority stuff like the sword of Auglemer and the Chalice so I'm guessing they also have the hammers. They seem to have an agreement with Patala were patala sends markatas and and Fomoria kills them with the Sickle Whose Crop is Pain for 30 D gems per turn. Also have the Well of Misery, bought with gems from the Sickle no doubt. If he pays Patala half of the D gems from the markatas then he'll get 35D per turn from non-site income. Morrigans cost 2 D per unit for reference. Also have the Chalice witch grants him tart access.

Fomoria is less scary than he looks though because he got screwed on the starting location. He is big, but also in the middle of the map witch means that he borders(d)a lot of people. If patala wants to stop turtling and start invading people then they will probably have to go through Fomoria if they want to do anything more than raiding.

Could become strong again if EA Agartha attacks his old nemesis LA Agartha though. Or if he can beat Mari with Caelums help.

3)Caelum: Not as big as Fomoria or Mari but he got a lot of tarts and he also holds Ermors 15d capitol. He attacked Mari recently, but its too early to tell if he is winning. Though he have taken a fort. GoH global.

4)Patala: Patala seem to be sitting on its arse most days and does not make a lot of waves. But I know from experience that Patala is one of the scariest late game nations and he seem to be building up a blood economy. Also gets (?) 15d gems a turn from Fomoria. Have also not spent many resources on wars so he probably have a big war-chest.

5)EA Agartha: If you read my previous comments then you know that I feel that EA Agartha is the single most overpowered nation in the game right now. Worse than Ermor and R'lyeh even. Granted, he has been stalling for, what? 12 turns? But in that time his enemy Sauromatica have not been able ti kill him or caused him very much damage. Lets take that again: Not even with 12 turns of EA Agartha not doing anything can Sauromatica kill them. Thats how powerful they are.

They also have the earth blood global now.

Sure, they probably lost a lot of initiative from all those stalls, but they also do not have any scary neighbors that could oppose them. Sauro is weak and should be an easy kill, LA Agartha is locked in a life or death struggle with Fomoria and would be ill suited for a second war. Bogarus was badly mauled by a Niefelheim rush back in the days and would probably also have a hard time fighting Agartha.



Honorable mention: LA Agartha. LA Agartha have a scale build and a decently large empire, so he will probably get stronger with time. But it did not seem like he was winning against Fomoria last time I checked. If he can turn the war around and kill Fomoria with Mari and grab more of the lands then mari, then he might have a chance.

With Caelum attacking Mari it just might be possible for him if Fomoria have been weakened enough. Mari will not have enough forces to take the lands for himself and Agartha can reap the rewards.

A long shot though.

[Zywack]

That's the thing that annoys me most, personally. This is my 2nd multiplayer game and I had joined thinking that it'd be really short. With a small-ish map overcrowded with players (and potentially experienced players too), I figured that I'd be out really early but that it'd give me some experience for the early game and that I'd join a new game after the summer is over. Especially since I had bad luck combined with some really, really stupid decisions and mistakes early on. I thought I'd have the summer off without having to check Dominion turns.

Yet here we are 63 turns in (I thought the average game length was around 60 turns), with still 10 players out of 15 alive and no end in sight... I personally wouldn't be upset if someone ran away with the victory (It's possible especially since the winning condition is having 8 capitals) but it seems pretty unlikely for at least one more month. I'd be more convenient for me to just drop the game, but...

I'm not going to ruin the game for anyone and I'll just keep on trucking to the best of my abilities until the end. So all I'll do is complain that this game is taking way too long in this one post and shut up about it afterward :)

I'm also planning to write a "retrospective" after the game or my nation is over to explain my thought process as to why and how my nation ended up the way it did, the way it is going and so that you guys can point out just how stupid I've been... Although I realized by myself a pretty hefty pile of stupidity already.

[Admiral_Aorta]

Patala: Patala seem to be sitting on its arse most days and does not make a lot of waves. But I know from experience that Patala is one of the scariest late game nations and he seem to be building up a blood economy. Also gets (?) 15d gems a turn from Fomoria. Have also not spent many resources on wars so he probably have a big war-chest.
It's worth noting that patala has eaten most of EA tien chi, including their capital.

[Bullock]

I have extended the timer to 50h/ turn since it has been requested by few players.

[Zywack]

That's not what I meant by "This game is taking too long" :) Ah well. Now I at least have some flexibility of choosing when to check the turn so I guess it's not all that bad.

Regarding people being unlucky being stuck into the middle of the map... I'm curious why wrap-around maps aren't played more often? I play the game with some friends alongside the AI (Yeah, I know), and we always play wraparounds for that reason. They make for a more enjoyable game, in my opinion.

[Corinthian]

Dont worry Zywack, if the game would turn out to be a total grind people will eventually just surrender to whoever. I dont think I have personally seen a game last longer than 85 turns or so. Though normally I have a rule to not play on maps larger than 200 provinces that I broke for this game.

As for wraparounds, they have both pros and cons. You get more even starting positions, but you also get a lot more fronts and neighbors witch means a lot more planning and diplo. It is kind of micro heavy.

Though there are wraparounds, like galaldia, that gets around this problem by making the map a bunch of interconnected islands to limit the amount of neighbors you can have.

Personally I prefer normal maps with fixed starting positions. Its the best of both worlds.


On this map I think C'tis was the one who got shafted the hardest by his start. He started only 1 province away from crazy-bless Atlantis and two provinces away from Marignion. His end came quickly.

Best starting positions were had by Patala, Caelum and Atlantis I think. Atlantis started one province away from a neighbor, But it was also his only close neighbor.

[Zywack]

Whelp, that's officially the last time I play an anonymous game. The communication delay is just too much of a frustration... By the time the other people can answer to your message (or that you can answer to them), the situation has time to be completely different than what it originally was and it can make you feel like a gigantic ******* when that happens.

Ah well, onward and upward!

[bbz]

Whelp, that's officially the last time I play an anonymous game. The communication delay is just too much of a frustration... By the time the other people can answer to your message (or that you can answer to them), the situation has time to be completely different than what it originally was and it can make you feel like a gigantic ******* when that happens.

Ah well, onward and upward!

I agree completely. you cannot arrange anything to stop the big wolfs on time before they eat you.

[Admiral_Aorta]

Since I am now officially dead, I can reveal my identity as EA Tien Chi. It's been a pretty fun game.

[Zywack]

Thanks for the fun Admiral_Aorta!

By the way, I definitively liked your prophet names... Kudos to you and Atlantis for staying right until the very end!

[Corinthian]

Forsooth! I had pegged you in as Caelum, Admiral. So what was your plan for this game and what went wrong? EA TC seem like a very hard nation to play well and I am not sure what kind of build I would use.

Thanx for trying your best.

[Admiral_Aorta]

Why did you think I was caelum out of curiosity? For strategy, I took a water bless and used warriors of the 5 elements to expand and fight early on. The main problem with EA Tien Chi is that they're very reliant on their capital, their only good mages are capital only and so are the warriors of the 5 elements.

[Zywack]

Am I mistaken, or did two nation stall this turn?

[HoleyDooley]

I was one stale, thought I had sent in my turn and due to restricted internet access now I just missed the 12 hour warning.

HD

[bbz]

btw guys I'm not sure about you but I'm happy to call it a Marignon win.

[Zywack]

Well... On one hand, it's incredibly likely that Marignon does have this game in the bag unless there's some other super-power on the map that I'm not aware of which can compete them. Also, as I mentionned before, I thought that the game would be over by summer so I wouldn't be terribly upset by a Marignon victory.

On the other hand, I can probably give them some sort of fight for a few turns for what that's worth and I'm unfortunately not informed enough to know the status of every nation out there so I can't really judge if surrendering to Marignon would ruin someone else chances. So I'll abstain on my vote: If the majority vote to give the game to Marignon, I'll happily oblige. If not, then the fight is still on for me.

[mattyburn7]

I'm happy to fight on a few more turns. Just starting an invasion...SHould be fun! But I'm happy to go either way.

[bbz]

Sure, Ok but since the game is about to end anyways.:) I am going to reveal myself. I am playing as Fomoria. I got steamrolled by marignon(well the fact that I was fighting 2 -3 nations for the majority of the game didnt help either) But he was more experienced than me and he did really well in using(abusing) mind hunts on my already poor in astral empire.:)

I am happy to fight some more turns as well but I know where we are heading. It feel like im on the sinking titanic, you just know that it will happen and all you can do is struggle.:)

[KeithZ]

This is Caelum.

I took only dom 4 to get relatively good scale and an aweken enchantress. Now I'm not able to stop Marignon's dom kill after my temples were brought down one by one.

Sorry guys, I should have done better in the war against Marignon. I made too many mistakes because of my lack of experience in the end game.

Anyway it's good game, I did have some fun and learned a lot.

[mattyburn7]

I will reveal this. I am NOT Marignon! LOL

[Zywack]

I unfortunately have to reveal the same thing!

Thanks for the fun game bbz and KeithZ! You guys tried your best against the Marignon steamroll and it's going to be the same thing happening to the rest of us soon enough (except worse)...

Unless Marignon hits the "Control 8 capitals and you win the game" clause that's stated in the first post before he has to squish more of us, anyway.

To the Marignon player: Please do state whenever you hit 8 capitals so that we can give you congratulations and move on :)

[bbz]

Yea It was a fun game, actually the most interesting game I've had so far. Sorry for the stales at the end I kindoff lost all my astral mages and good earth mages so my armies were not as good as they could have been. Also Mari controlled most of my territories and I didnt have a chance of reclaiming them back(and RL required more attention at the time). I will try and submit some sort of quick turns from now on so that you guys dont have to wait for me to stale.

[Zywack]

Well, after seeing last turn, I'm officially changing my vote to "Surrender". I mentionned earlier that I could probably give Marignon a few turns of fighting. It turns out I can't even do that. The biggest problems are:

1) While I did fully expect Marignon to carpet bomb with remote spells and that I did have plans in place to counter that... I didn't think they were able to do it on such a large scale, with basically no cost to their resources. And now they'll get even higher income, so...

2) I did have a 'clever' trap laid out. Unfortunately, the trap trigger got blown up without actually triggering the trap, so the main plan went out the window.

3) You know the Cleansing Bell item thingy? The 10 gem anti-demon item? I had the chance to see an handful of them in action this turn for the first time ever! Hurray! Time to see what kind of ravage they can do against demons! And they couldn't even get rid of a few imps... Let's just say that I made a not terribly wise large gem investment.

4) The largest problem is that even defeating Marignon's main armies in battle would do little to help: Their gem/slave production is through the roof, so killing armies only gives a tiny amount of time before they get replaced. Hitting their production is the only way to go, but that's only accomplishable by raiding, and they are definitively able to counter-raid and grab your own production: Even if you can somehow manage a 1-1 trades, things won't be going in your favor. When an empire gets that large, there's no key point to hit that will damage them a lot.

5) They are blood sacrificing for dominion. They are the only nation left that can blood sacrifice (Maybe Bogarus too? I'm not sure...), and even a very strong dominion score isn't going to stop that for long once they get going full-swing.

So that's why I'm joining bbz in the "Let's surrender and move on" movement. As I mentionned a long time ago, it's really inconvenient for me to do my turns during the summer so I'll be glad when this game is over (Although it has been fun). I'm not quitting though: I'll fight until either
A) my nation is dead
B) the surrender happens
C) Marignon gets 8 capitals.
so you don't have to worry. If you feel you still got a shot, go ahead and continue.


Regarding Mind Hunt... I do feel it's a problem in Dominion. I have no issue with the concept of the spell, it's just that I feel that nations without any Astral access are HEAVILY hampered by Mind Hunt. It's pretty much "Get astral or get out", which limits the pool of viable nations end-game unless they manage to get very dominant early on.

In my only other multiplayer game, I replaced a Shinuyama player that left early and somehow managed to salvage the nation from the brink of destruction... The problem is that I had absolutely no Astral access (The god I inherited had a wonderful 2 Dominion strength, 3 fire and 7 death) and I had to face Bandar Log to destroy their temples so that I didn't get dominion-killed.

So out of simple fear of Mind Hunt, I had to trade pretty much my entire gem stockpiles for Nature Gems, just so that I could summon a lot of Kitsune who can occasionally get Astral for the sole purpose of sneaking some inside my main armies. It panned out okay since the Bandar Log player didn't have Mind Hunt researched for a long time, but the simple fact that the threat of the spell existed forced me to diverge a huge amount of resources to try to counter it... And I was lucky that I actually had a nation summon that had a small chance to get astral in the first place.

[bbz]

Yea I dont mind the mind hunt concept as well. I just used my astral mages unwisely and then he took hold of the only province where I could build them and that was a gg form me.

[Zywack]

Actually, I got a question about that for a future game! I've seen in a few guides things like "Just use an independent Astral mage to forge amulet of magic resistance", or "Use independent astral mages as a shield from enemy Mind Hunt".

But I fail to see how that's a viable strategy plan. While it's only my 2nd competitive multiplayer game, I've played about 8 cooperative or solo games vs the AI. In those games, I've came across independent Astral mages a grand total of 4 times (And one of those was a 1/4 pick). That number is sliiightly higher if I include those that come from site findable only with astral, but not by much.

So in my experience, you get 1 astral independent mage per about 50 provinces. Am I simply "unlucky", and if not, how can one build their initial strategy upon getting an Astral mage when odds are they'll never get one?

[mattyburn7]

Since Others have revealed - I am Bogarus.

And since there were some comments on my adventures with Niefel. I will elaborate. Was a fun part of game.

I experienced an early rush from Niefel which was really bad for Bogarus as I did not have an awake pretender and just the crap troops. I needed to get some mages produced and some spells researched quickly. Long story short I did get enough researched to put a hurt on him, but it basically forced me into 1 army. Meanwhile I was getting raided like mad as he could approach from 2 directions.

Where it got fun was when I finally destroyed 2 of his armies and thought I could take the war to him. I did only to find a Niefel army slip in from the other direction and get my capital before I could get back. That led to the most desperate part (which people commented on). I had no temple (Had to protect my only mage that could make a temple). Hardly any money (desertions every turn). I think I was down 2 3 provinces (2 of which had forts). Then in a fortuitous 2 turns I was able to get back my capital after a long siege (destroying an army of his in there), I destroyed another army of his in the field and destroyed a 3rd army that contained his Pretender. back in business! I then marched on his capital destroying another army in the process) and thought he was pretty much done. At that point, AI took over. He got his Pretender called back and had more in the capital than I expected. I had only sent a small army since I wanted to get back to researching and got my butt kicked. THen Marignon moved in and wiped up Niefel.

Twas Fun. Sorry for long post.

[Zywack]

See? That shows how mean Marignon is! They went and kill-stealed you! :)

Well, it sounds like you had a ton of fun, and that's what's important! And I guess we did get to play another game together, although this time we've had absolutely no interaction except for gem trades... Ah well! Maybe either of us will win one someday!

Since things are pretty much in the open and that we know the identity of all the players (except for Marignon which narrows it down a lot), I got a question for Corinthian: Why did you judge my starting position to have been one of the best?

All I could scrounge up was 8 provinces in a tiny peninsula (I could have had a few more without an early troglodyte earthquake and a Bogus killing parts of my army and if I had made fewer mistakes, but I would have gotten 10 at best), hemmed in by T'ien Ch'i, Fomoria and R'Yleh's capital was right on my shore. I wasn't any closer to the corner than Fomoria was (which was juged as an horrible starting location).

I did have a comfy and swell spot when you made your analysis, but the only reason I had it was because it was taken from T'ien Ch'is hand and that R'Yleh was gone. I'm also slightly upset that you mentionned that I was sitting on my *** doing nothing: I've been at war since turn 12 (where R'yleh and me declared war on each other the exact same turn) with about 6 turns of peace in between at most. My wars were incredibly slow and not terribly effective, but I was still actively fighting them :)

[Corinthian]

Hello everyone. As most of you have already guessed I am the Marignion player. To those who wonder, I will be getting my eight capitol in 2 turns (Caelum). Weather you want to continue to play for that long is up to you guys. I have a ton of micro to do but it helps that i'm playing sloppy and dont have to plan for every eventuality anymore. Currently I probably got more gem income than the rest of the world combined. I can afford to be inefficient. I get some 75D and 450 slaves a turn to illustrate my point. The remotes I can drop.... Oh and my apologies to EA Agartha. I did not mean to cast Ghost riders on your lake. My finger slipped or something.


Anyway, this game was not one that I thought I would win. I had a horrible start, so this comes as as much of a surprise to me as it does for you guys.

And now that I have a better view over Patalas lands, I see that their start probably was not as good as I though. I initially assumed that TC started to the northeast of were he actually did start. Because that's were he started in my test game. Either way you were probably lucky to only have two land neighbors + R'lyeh to worry about.

My location was pretty bad by comparison. I started in the middle of a desert, close to the middle of the map, near most of the choke points on the southern hemisphere. This meant that not only did I have bad income, I also had a lot of potential neighbors. Also I started within 2 provinces of a neighbor toward the broadest field of provinces so my avenue of expansion was really limited. I realized that I had to do something drastic soon or I'll would get hedged in. Thus I already decided on turn 1 that I would rush whoever was south of me. It turned out to be C'tis.

The reason I though I could rush someone was that I had taken an awake green dragon as a SC expander and I figured that he could take whatever early troops that an enemy might field unless they were crazy blessed sacreds or giants. I was both right and wrong. My first contact with C'tis was when I bumped in to their expansion army with my dragon on turn 2. It was my victory with little problems. Knowing that they had lost a valuable percentage of their forces and that they only had their capitol I smelled weakness and sent my dragon to attack an indy province with my dominion in it in it in order to gather HP. On turn 4 I attacked C'tis unsuspecting capitol with my HP boosted dragon. And this is were things went wrong. Despite what I though would have been an easy battle vs C'tis PD militia, my dragon was killed! A chest wound combined with a lot of crits that took of 50% of its HP in the last round. It was enough to kill it before it could retreat through flight. Had the dragon survived another turn then he would probably have won due to the enemy routing.

Another problem with fighting C'tis as it turns out is that their elite warriors with their two attk12 attacks, were the perfect counters to my high (19) defense Royal Knight

Eventually I managed to outmaneuver him however. He chose to take his prophet and half his army in order to attack deep in to my territories and in the meanwhile I managed to siege his capitol and cut of his source of reinforcements. After that I just blood sacced him to death due to his weak dominion. He still managed to put up a fierce ressistance in the last couple of turns by summoning Behemoths and Longdead horsemen. He almost managed to turn the war around again due to him killing the army sieging his capitol. But in the last couple of turns most of his mages routed and had no were to flee. So in the end it was a pyrrhic victory and he was not able to follow up on it.

I though I was screwed in those days because despite my victory against C'tis I was far behind the other players in almost everything. I only managed to capture 10 provinces in the first year. And I mostly recruited priests in order to fight C'tis undead and to dom kill him. But it helps that two of the ten provinces were capitols and that I could overtax both of them to fuel my recovery. The priests were bad at researching, but they were atleast useful for bringing back my god.

I was also lucky that I started next to LA Ermor. Most people do not feel that it is very lucky to start as their neighbor but most people does not play Marignion. Mari is the perfect nation to handle LA Ermor. Recruit everywhere H3 priests, national anti undead spells and the fact that demons dont need to eat means that everyone of my other neighbors were hesitant to attack me until I had finished of Ermor for them.

Or thats what I tried to convince my much more powerful neighbors in diplo in order to get them to join me against him. As opposed to crushing me while I was still weak and an easy prey. It seem to have worked and I slowly got stronger and stronger as I pitted my neighbors against each other until, um, here we are!

Whelp.

[mattyburn7]

I have to give thanks to Corinthian/Marignon for encouraging pep talks during my war with Niefel.

[Zywack]

First of all, congratulations on your win! Regarding going on until you get your 8 capitol... Well, I had the mighty moose version 2.0 army setting out from my capital, and I was itching for a fight with your 140 devil army to see how it would go mostly for science and entertainment purposes. That's the only thing I was looking foward though: I had enough units on standby ready to get back pretty much every single lost territory, but that means that nearly none of them would be ready for the following turn, and it would mean that I would be fighting a purely defensive war which is a losing proposition. I expect about 2-3 turns before all my battle capabilities beside my two main armies would be destroyed and that my territories would permenantly switch to you.

I'd be willing to play for 2 turns until it's officially over if you decide to do the devil vs the invincible moose army. It should be possible for both army to meet at province 126 by two turns. Whoever wins that fight doesn't change anything since you reach the winning condition at that time anyway... It's really to see the effect of a pile of spells I never got to play with ever before. No biggy if not.


While I had a ton of fun, man am I glad it's nearly over. I never thought it'd last that long, and while I had a good time, I'm definitively not going to join a new game until October at the earliest. I'm sorry for being so pushy for it to stop lately!

Regarding the game, I really didn't have the best of time early game either. I figured I needed an awake god since it was a crowded game and that Patala has a weak early game so I picked a Deva with 4 Death/ 5 Blood, 8 Dominion with nearly no scales (3 heat, and 3 positive ones but that's it). The awake pretender was really a waste, since she got Limped in the first battle by losing an handful of hp, and she pretty much spent the rest of the game site searching, forging or researching.

I had practiced my opening strat like 8 times until I had a pretty much lossless and quick expansion, but in the real game I lost some elephants really early on which hurt a lot. The only supposed high income town was garded by 80 troops, and it took me a lot of time to be able to grab it, and there was a 15% unrest site on it so I couldn't tax it more than 40%, and the troglodyte pop blew up a large part of what I had. When I saw how hemmed in I was, I figured that fighting T'ien Ch'i was the wisest option even though the odds weren't good, but when I saw R'Yleh's capital I panicked and decided that I had to fight them no matter what... They had Dominion 10, with 3 Cold, 3 Death, 3 everything negative on top of their dreadful aura.

I quickly learned that Poor Amphibian Cold Blooded units in 3 Cold provinces spell disaster... I lost some of my few mages very early (which was devastating completely devastating for research) alongside with most of my fodder. The only effective spell I had was ice elementals, but I needed them desesperately so I turned out having nearly 0 research for a long time... While I'm not sure R'Yleh could have actually beat me on land, the only reason R'Yleh got beat was because Fomoria managed to kill off most of their troops, and me sieging down their capital was a looong process since they had hundred of troops protecting around 20 mages spamming Soul Slay. They broke out once, and after they got contained, they nearly managed to break out a second time and were only barely stopped by a few courageous Gandavara supported by Shark Attack and that friendly current thing: All my fodder were dead or running, and even my nagas were mostly gone... But they held, and R'yleh was finally killed... The gem income was nice, but population had dropped to under 3k due to their scales and aura so my income was still around 500 gold around turn 35.

As soon as R'Yleh was destroyed, T'ien Ch'i declared war on Fomoria. It was my golden opportunity to get some more valuable territory and head toward the safety of the corner. By the time my NAP was up, Fomoria had destroyed a few of T'ien Ch'is army, but was occupied by other enemies. In order to be able to face T'ien Ch'i, I had to rely on Gift from Heaven, so my research was still going extremely slowly... The first castle felt relatively quickly, but the assault on their capital failed but I had enough surviving troops to hold the siege but not to attack (Most of my losses were mooses or spiders to T'ien Ch'i's mages)... So the siege on T'ien Ch'is capital turned out to be around 20 turns long. One of T'ien Ch'i army went rampaging in my homeland, while a newly created army (with mages) tried catching it with little success but it still wittled it down slowly. All four armies merged together at T'ien Ch'is capital, and the war was finally won.


In the mean time, there was the Scythe farming which was much more beneficial to Fomoria than it was to us, but Fomoria was pretty much stopping and distracting potential enemies while we were claiming T'ien Ch'i land so it felt like a fair trade. At that point we offered Fomoria to side with them against Marignon, which Fomoria always refused: It did make sense considering I would be fighting on Fomoria's territories mainly, so even if we were to win, I would be the one gaining most of the benefits... And at the time, a Fomoria victory was certainly a possibility, so we instead concentrated on finishing off T'ien Ch'i and mass-researching to finally get our research to par with the rest of the world.

My best chance for victory seemed to be by feeding Fomoria gems and equipment so that the Marignon-Fomoria war kept dragging on with no benefit for either, while I would take on LA Agartha in the mean time. Winning over them might (which was a longshot I admit) would have put Patala closer to the top 2 nations, and maybe even eventually have a shot at winning... But Fomoria went from going well to folding in a few short turns, and everything went out the window. I brokered peace with LA Agartha so that I could fight Marignon before it was too late, but... Yeah, it was too way too late probably even when I kept offering Fomoria to send armies to help.

So I did a poke on Marignon so that I could have a clear shot at their counter-raider with my own elite units kept in reserve, but they just destroyed my poke with pretty much no resources and took 3/4th of my empire in a single turn... Which brings us to now.


So here's the story of the world from the Patalan point of view! My biggest mistakes were a bad early expansion, and nearly inexistant research throughout 2/3rd of the game as I had extremely low gold income (Only got fixed after taking T'ien Ch'i's lands which were quite rich), and that I kept using the majority of my mages in battle from the beginning of the game. Oh, plus a relatively bad pretender (A good bless would have been soooo nice), and the most retarted plan:

I thought I could enter Blood extremely quickly. Blood 3, Thaumaturgy 4, voila! All I needed for super cheap blood hunting... Except that for some reason I thought that my main nagas had 3-4 points in NATURE not Earth. So, my super early blood hunting actually required Conjuration 5 (Naiad), Construction 4 (Nature booster), Blood 3 and thaumaturgy 4. That's suddenly quite a bit less quick...

The thing that did annoy me most though is that during the entire game, I faced armies of 15+ mages protected by hordes of fodder. It's what I kept facing every single battle with R'Yleh, and the same with T'ien Ch'i... And the only counter I had against their mages was using my own plus Animal Horde to take the magic damage while Gandavara and naga did the clearing... But that required me to have mages everywhere to fight, which was annoying and so hurtful to research.

[Corinthian]

OK. This thread got a bit overwhelming for a while. But I will try to answer some questions and post some comments below.


I'd be willing to play for 2 turns until it's officially over if you decide to do the devil vs the invincible moose army. It should be possible for both army to meet at province 126 by two turns. Whoever wins that fight doesn't change anything since you reach the winning condition at that time anyway... It's really to see the effect of a pile of spells I never got to play with ever before. No biggy if not.
This sounds like an excellent idea. I will bring the army to province 126 this turn. There might also be some kind of Ember lord bumming around over there. I have honestly never used one of those things before and I wonder a bit about its capabilities. Its a self buffer though so it might not mater much in the heat of a big battle though.


3) You know the Cleansing Bell item thingy? The 10 gem anti-demon item? I had the chance to see an handful of them in action this turn for the first time ever! Hurray! Time to see what kind of ravage they can do against demons! And they couldn't even get rid of a few imps... Let's just say that I made a not terribly wise large gem investment.

Those cleansing bells are not bad for the price I think. But you need something to hold off the demons while they do their thing. Another problem might be that I'm using the demon type with the most HP. They are more useful vs hell knights and demon thugs that relies on protection though.


4) The largest problem is that even defeating Marignon's main armies in battle would do little to help: Their gem/slave production is through the roof, so killing armies only gives a tiny amount of time before they get replaced. Hitting their production is the only way to go, but that's only accomplishable by raiding, and they are definitively able to counter-raid and grab your own production: Even if you can somehow manage a 1-1 trades, things won't be going in your favor. When an empire gets that large, there's no key point to hit that will damage them a lot.

5) They are blood sacrificing for dominion. They are the only nation left that can blood sacrifice (Maybe Bogarus too? I'm not sure...), and even a very strong dominion score isn't going to stop that for long once they get going full-swing.

Attacking a blood hunting operation is a ***** but can be done if you plan ahead. I think your Rocs could have won that battle with only a single F resist ring each and orders to hold in the back.

As for my blood sacrificing I am surprised at how useless it is. I have probably sacrificed about 2000 slaves over the course of the game and although I have domkilled a few people who would otherwise have died anyway, I have not managed to use it against anyone with the means to still fight back. I thought it would be more powerful than this. I mean I could have gotten some 520 devils and 800 imps for those slaves. Still useful in combination with the purgatory to keep Fomoria of my back. I'm surprised that he did not try to dispel it seeing how much it limited his strategic options. It was a minimum cast.

Actually, I got a question about that for a future game! I've seen in a few guides things like "Just use an independent Astral mage to forge amulet of magic resistance", or "Use independent astral mages as a shield from enemy Mind Hunt".

But I fail to see how that's a viable strategy plan. While it's only my 2nd competitive multiplayer game, I've played about 8 cooperative or solo games vs the AI. In those games, I've came across independent Astral mages a grand total of 4 times (And one of those was a 1/4 pick). That number is sliiightly higher if I include those that come from site findable only with astral, but not by much.

So in my experience, you get 1 astral independent mage per about 50 provinces. Am I simply "unlucky", and if not, how can one build their initial strategy upon getting an Astral mage when odds are they'll never get one?

The amount of astral mages that you can get without site searching depends greatly on the age you play in. The earlier the age, the more indy mage poptypes. I personally think it is fine to rely on idies for astral sometimes in the Early era. Crystal amazons and lizard tribes are common there. For a middle age nation like Shinu this is not an option. But you can still get astral, -stealthy astral even- from conj 6, Specters. I actually have two specters with astral running about in Fomorias lands in the hopes that he would try to mindhunt their provinces. But it is very hard to predict what fomoria feels like mindunting. I like mindhunting powerful, expensive creatures. Fomoria seem to mainly mindhunt my demon commanders and Ghouls? And those are not worth enough that I will bother protecting them.

The real problem with Mind hunt comes from nations with recruitable S3 mages that can also be healed. Like Arco. Or any astral with the Chalice or GoH. Even astral mages strategically placed will only offer temporary reprieve in that scenario.


Regarding the game, I really didn't have the best of time early game either. I figured I needed an awake god since it was a crowded game and that Patala has a weak early game so I picked a Deva with 4 Death/ 5 Blood, 8 Dominion with nearly no scales (3 heat, and 3 positive ones but that's it). The awake pretender was really a waste, since she got Limped in the first battle by losing an handful of hp, and she pretty much spent the rest of the game site searching, forging or researching.

Patala is one of few nations who can actually get some use out of the deva pretender. For most nations she is overpriced. When I were supposed to play patala in a game, I used the deva in one of my tests with great success, but with a vastly different build.

Taking death on it is too expensive for what it gives you. Taking Air 1 is much more economical and allows you to summon Dakinis who themselves comes with death magic. It also helps that Dakinis are some of the most unfair commanders in the game. Just ask mattyburn7.

Another thing to remember is that you always want at least dom 9 on an awake expander unless it is a dragon. This is because they get Awe (+0) from dom 9. Fear and awe means the deva is very hard to injure in melee and Airshield from the A1 magic protects it from arrows. Very hard to stop. And later you can give it equipment and have a monkey cast body ethereal and Luck on it.

[mattyburn7]

Yes. I can attest to the Dakini. They put a hurting on me.

[Zywack]

So... game's officially over now that you hit the winning condition? Congratulations on your victory Corinthian! Should we contact Bullock so that it's officially done?

Thanks a lot for all the information in your last post. It's very helpful! I'm very surprised to hear about the blood sacrificing though: From what I had read it's a near unstoppable nightmarish (except blow the nation militarily before hand) thing that ends game quickly once someone gets the engine rolling, which I would have assumed that 2000 slaves would fit under that.

What do you use for your Mind Hunters? I was shocked at how succesful they were against 18 MR units, with like 75% success against them. I know you can put a Rune Smasher for additional magic penetration, and the super expensive Ring of Wizardry and Sorcery (which are probably better used elsewhere), and I think that additional points in astral boost the penetration (does it), but what else did you use to have them be that succesful? I did have few shape-changed Astral Nagini sneaking around but they didn't turn out to help any in the end.


The invincible moose army wins again! Hurray! At least I can say I learned how to make effective reverse communions this game. Well, it's not the original moose army since that one is still walking in circles doing nothing useful up north, but same basic concept but improved (Minus the Gandavara that I couldn't afford anymore)... As far as I'm concerned, Animal Horde is the best spell in game for blockers when cast in a forest: You instantly get 100+ units with high strength (instant castle-wall destroying), a lot have extremely high HP, a lot have Berzerk and the spiders are awesome as flyier-catchers with their web when split in small squads set with attack flyers. The one cast I did in a mountain was certainly less satisfactory, though...

Since it's been a battle with a ton of spells I had never seen in action before, I got some questions and observations regarding that battle though:

1) Does Fire Arrow actually affects the throw lightning ability of your Storm Demons? That sounds completely not logical, but...

2) That hellfire thingy that does fire damage to everyone on the battlefield... That pretty much ensure that no blood magic is usable at all since it hits all the slaves, right? I had an Apsara master that was set to cast Reinvigoration each round but she only did it once.

3) Does Solar Brilliance helps a lot or not? It was awfully hard to tell it's effect (or lack of it) by looking at the battle.

4) Cleansing Bell fires every round... I thought it only fired one time per battle, so yes I agree that it's worth the cost now.

5) While there were "only" 5 global effects during the battle, did the others have an effect and were simply "unrecorded" on top of the screen, or did they have no effect?

6) I have a Nagini in my capital this turn that has 12 afflictions, including losing both eyes and her head, but she's somehow still alive and not an undead. I have no idea how that possibly happened since I had no Nagini with afflictions the turn before...

[Corinthian]

What do you use for your Mind Hunters? I was shocked at how succesful they were against 18 MR units, with like 75% success against them. I know you can put a Rune Smasher for additional magic penetration, and the super expensive Ring of Wizardry and Sorcery (which are probably better used elsewhere), and I think that additional points in astral boost the penetration (does it), but what else did you use to have them be that succesful? I did have few shape-changed Astral Nagini sneaking around but they didn't turn out to help any in the end.

Well Shishis only have MR 16 though. And my mages probably get penetration 17 after wearing a rune smasher, an amulet of penetration(?) and an eye of the void. Also the game random number generator does not work like people think it does and tend to produce a lot more extreme results than expected. Add to this the fact that soulslay ignores effects like luck and twist fate and you can see how it can be considered powerful.

It is quite expensive to equip a mind hunter without hammers though. When using a mage with S3 base it costs 40 gems to equip them. With a S2 base it takes 55-75 gems depending on weather you'd like a crystal coin or a sorc ring.

Also, does the stealthy nagas really get astral on them?


Since it's been a battle with a ton of spells I had never seen in action before, I got some questions and observations regarding that battle though:

1) Does Fire Arrow actually affects the throw lightning ability of your Storm Demons? That sounds completely not logical, but...

2) That hellfire thingy that does fire damage to everyone on the battlefield... That pretty much ensure that no blood magic is usable at all since it hits all the slaves, right? I had an Apsara master that was set to cast Reinvigoration each round but she only did it once.

3) Does Solar Brilliance helps a lot or not? It was awfully hard to tell it's effect (or lack of it) by looking at the battle.

4) Cleansing Bell fires every round... I thought it only fired one time per battle, so yes I agree that it's worth the cost now.

5) While there were "only" 5 global effects during the battle, did the others have an effect and were simply "unrecorded" on top of the screen, or did they have no effect?

6) I have a Nagini in my capital this turn that has 12 afflictions, including losing both eyes and her head, but she's somehow still alive and not an undead. I have no idea how that possibly happened since I had no Nagini with afflictions the turn before...

1) The Fire arrows were cast by mistake and probably did more harm than good as they overwrite the 15 AN lightning damage with 8 AP fire damage. Traitor! What he was actually supposed to cast was Heat from Hell. The problem is just that Buer seem to auto cast Heat from Hell and you cant cast the same enchantment twice.

This is a bug though. Buer is actually supposed to cast the spell Heat of Buer witch have an effect identical to heat from hell. Thus doubling the effect. No such luck. Not sure if this is a CBM issue or if it has always been this way. Heat of Buer is a real spell that exist in the spell list though. I'm not sure why he does not cast it.

Anyway, with only one of the spells cast it could not overwhelm the effect of relief. Sadly.

2) It only does fire damage to 50% of the field each turn and you can still use the surviving slaves even if they are damaged as long as they dont run away. Also, due to an undocumented feature it seem to become useless if the enemy have any amount of fire resistance. Because fire resistance removes the armor piercing capabilities of the fire. If I had been smart I would just have skipped it and had all three mages stand in from and cast Flame Storm on turn 1. (A different spell!)

3) Solar brilliance never help. People think it does but it really dont. At least it does not help damaging undeads and demons like it claims, because it is both armor piercing and MR resist and only does 4 points of damage.

It can help make sure that most of the mages on the battle field becomes blind if the battle drags out long enough. I managed to blind large parts of a thunderstrike communion with this spell once.

5) Was there really more than 5 ongoing enchantments. Not every spell that affects every unit is an ongoing enchantment. You only need to change peoples skin in to gold once and it last all through the battle.

6) Haha! I think that might be a bug as normally only magical constructs and hydras and stuff are supposed to get that affliction. But they are magic beings so why not?

[bbz]

Congrats on the win, well deserved.

[Zywack]

Actually... I wasn't paying attention at all, but looking back at the map, my capital actually dropped at 1 candles and a lot of my territories that were at 9 candles a turn or two ago are actually under your religion... So your sacrificing spam did hit me incredibly hard this turn. And since I didn't have too many candles over T'ien Ch'i ancestral lands yet, I guess I'd be dominion-killed in the near future even with 8 points in Dominion. Maybe the mass sacrificing just needs to hit a critical mass before it gets going.

The stealthy naga (the Nagini) do come with Astral at 1/4 odds. Since I spent a pretty large amount of turns not having enough income to buy a single Nagarashi, I ended up with quite a few Nagini and I kept the Astral ones safe in prevision of using them as anti-mind hunters since the start of the game or usage in communions. They've proven useful as researchers and as battle mages as a big part of the original moose army so I think I made the right decision to buy mainly those instead of buying an ultra cheap monkey one turn to be able to buy a Nagarashi the following one. I could start to buy a Nagarashi each turn following taking only 3 of those rich T'ien Ch'i provinces anyway so I did end up with a pretty decent Nagarashi amount by end game.


I actually did have a Conjuration Bonus: 20 site at province 204, but I only got that territory around turn 60 and had it running with fort + lab at around turn 66 so I unfortunately didn't get as much usage as I wished out of it. It did prove pretty useful for those rocs, shishis and rudras, though.

Regarding Solar Brilliance... Yeah, the spell description sounded way too good on paper to be accurate. Thanks for informing me of it's usage (or lack thereoff). For the 18 MR, I was more thinking about those krakens that got sniped off than the Shishis, but... That's extremely useful information about the extreme rolls! Plus, I totally missed the amulet and the eye. In a totally unrelated note, I didn't realize that it was extremely likely that Storm Demons actually had Storm Power: It didn't screw up things too badly fortunately, but it certainly could have!


Anyway, I won't play more turns: If the winning condition has been hit, then the game is over. It'd be nice if the two Agarthas and Sauromatia did come to confirm everything though so it can be all officially over.

Edit: Thanks for the guidance and the help during the game, bbz!

[bbz]

No probs. I'm glad I could help:)

[Bullock]

Si i can announce the victory of Corinthian and close the game?

[Zywack]

I'd say yes. The winning condition was set before the game begun, and Corinthian reached it. No one stated any objection to it either: I think it's just that the two Agartha and Sauromatia didn't read this thread for a long time. Considering that it usually went weeks at a time without any posts, it wouldn't be too unlikely.